IANALBSIPOOTI*

by folkbum

I will comment, because I suppose I am expected to. Three things:

1. It continues to baffle me that the 21st century Republican Party insists that the 20th century never happened: outlawing unions, relaxing child labor laws, bringing back bail-bonding, trying to kill the internet, leaving the poor and elderly to die early and brutally without the help of modern medicine. What's next, corsets? slavery?

2. This one's a question: Do all the contracts signed in the last 90 days become presumptively void, or do we have to wait for some asshat to file suit in each case? It seems to me that any old asshat will do, as every taxpayer in the state would seem to have standing.

3. There was a time, genuinely, when I was younger and perhaps more naive, that I thought teaching was not just a good thing to do, but something that, generally, everyone else wanted to help me to do. Not in the sense that I had people lining up at the door to volunteer their services, but in the sense that it didn't feel like there was an organized effort to actively make the job shittier. This is no longer the case, and hasn't been for some time. It's not just the recent unpleasantness, of course; there's also No Child Left Behind and the Gates-Broad-Democrats for Education Reform nexus and the like. I still get a lot of pleasure from working with kids, from seeing their growth and achievement. But at this point it's pretty clear that what I do--teach students to write well--is no longer a valued skill and, in fact, something people simply don't want me to be able to do well or easily anymore.

* I am not a lawyer, but sometimes I play one on the internet.